Whether you’re studying for the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations test) or just want to improve your vocabulary, these are ten words you should learn how to use right now.
Replete: filled or well-supplied with something. Our cupboard is replete with canned soup.
Harbinger: A person or thing that foreshadows or foretells the coming of someone or something. Some people believe that crows are harbingers of death.
When using multiple verbs in a clause, it’s important to keep them in the same tense. For example: I went to the store, buy an apple, and ate it on the way home. ‘Went’ and ‘ate’ are both in past tense, but ‘buy’ is in present tense.
To fix this sentence, use ‘bought,’ which is the past tense of ‘buy.’ I went to the store, bought an apple, and ate it on the way home.
The simple past is a verb tense that is used to talk about things that happened or existed before now. Imagine someone asks what your brother Wolfgang did while he was in town last weekend.
The simple past tense shows that you are talking about something that has already happened. Unlike the past continuous tense, which is used to talk about past events that happened over a period of time, the simple past tense emphasizes that the action is finished.
According to History.com, a woman named Anna Jarvis created the American version of the holiday in 1908, prompted by the passing of her own mother. It became an official holiday in 1914. Jarvis later denounced the commercialization of the holiday and tried to have it removed from the calendar!
Here are some fascinating facts about Mother’s Day:
A few years ago, I had to come to terms with my burgeoning habit of browsing housing rental ads on Craigslist for places in the Pacific Northwest. I’d look at the listings and wonder, What would it be like to live in Washington? Wondering soon turned to obsession, and obsession spurred research. Before I knew it, I’d made a decision—I was going to leave my ancestral home in the upper Midwest and trek two thousand miles to live near the shores of Puget Sound.
Sentence fragments are snippets of words that don’t quite add up to a complete thought. There are several common types of sentence fragments, including:
Let’s take a look at each of them.
To understand sentence fragments, we must first know what a complete sentence looks like. In its most basic form, a sentence consists of a subject (a noun) and a predicate (a verb).
Imagine you need to write down a phone number, but you don’t have any paper handy. What would you use? Some scribble on a receipt, a napkin, or even their hands. Others repeat the number mentally until they locate a sheet of paper. It’s true; necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, people often generate creative solutions if they need something not readily available.
Whether you write essays, business materials, fiction, articles, letters, or even just notes in your journal, your writing will be at its best if you stay focused on your purpose. While there are many reasons why you might be putting pen to paper or tapping away on the keyboard, there are really only four main types of writing: expository, descriptive, persuasive, and narrative.
Meta is a word which, like so many other things, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for. When they used it, meta meant “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.” The “beyond” sense of meta still lingers in words like metaphysics or meta-economy. But that’s still not the meta most of us come across today.
One of the more popular uses of meta today is for the meaning best described by the formula “meta-X equals X about X.” So, if we take the word “data” for our X, and add the prefix meta- to it, we get metadata, or “data about data.” A meta-text is a text about texts, metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-joke is a joke about jokes.
Went is the past tense of go. Gone is the past participle of go.
Examples:
If you aren’t sure whether to use gone or went, remember that gone always needs an auxiliary verb before it (has, have, had, is, am, are, was, were, be), but went doesn’t.
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A few years ago, author Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, became a New York Times Bestseller. Kondo, a Japanese consultant who helps people get organized, detailed her KonMari method of decluttering in her book. We wondered if her principles could be applied to writing and found that they work just as well for creating clean copy as they do for creating a clean habitat.
Is grammar a game changer for people who are looking for love?
Imagine you’re sitting at a bar and an attractive stranger passes you a hastily scribbled note on a napkin. In addition to that person’s phone number, the note includes one of the following messages:
Its destiny that we met.
UR my soul mate.
Your beautiful.
Their isn’t a doubt in my mind that we will spend the rest of our lives together.
This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.
Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!
If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.
Submitting your application and waiting for a response from employers can be an excruciating process. Especially when you’re not hearing back and wondering if something’s amiss with your résumé. These ten expert tips will help you freshen up your résumé so you can land the interview.
It’s 2017, and we’re in a job seeker’s market. Employers are competing for top candidates.
When everything is about to change, the air becomes still. The sky turns a nondescript color of gray and people throw themselves into normalcy with a sense of purpose usually reserved for special occasions. They’ll walk through town and wave brightly to familiar faces, laugh a little too loudly, and buy a loaf of bread for dinner. All the while, they’ll readjust protective amulets and spend an extra minute in front of a household lararium, understanding that their reality will soon shift ever-so-slightly from its axis and life will never be the same again.
Generic nouns are nouns that refer to all members of a class or group. They are often used when making generalizations or talking about universal truths. Generic nouns can be singular or plural, and be used with or without articles.
Let’s take, for example, the very simple noun book. When writing a sentence, we might have a certain book in mind.
You probably have been told more than once that double negatives are wrong and that you shouldn’t use them. However, usually, it’s left at that — without any explanation of what exactly a double negative is or why it’s considered incorrect (in standard English). We want to fix that. Here is the essential list of things you must understand about double negatives.
It’s no wonder that many people misspell the phrase “whet your appetite.” After all, your mouth waters when your appetite is stirred, so why wouldn’t the phrase be spelled as “wet your appetite”?
In its most literal sense, “whet” means to sharpen like you would a knife or blade. When used in the phrase “whet your appetite,” it means to arouse interest or eagerness, to metaphorically sharpen your appetite.
